I was despondent to the point where
I was thinking about ending it all because of the continuing terrible
news about the environment and global warming. As I stood there on the
bridge like James Stewart's character, George Bailey, in the classic movie
"It's a Wonderful Life," an elderly gentleman came up to me.
He introduced himself as Clarence and said he knew how I was feeling and
that he'd be willing to show me how things would have been without the
environmentalist movement.
He pulled out a copy of the day's New York Times, but it wasn't the Times
I'd read earlier that morning. It was the Times as if the environmentalist
movement hadn't happened. The headline read "Fighting in Baghdad
Continues."

"So what's new?" I asked.
Then I read on. The fighting was between Iraqi and Iranian troops. The
smoldering conflict between those two countries had been rekindled in
the late 1990s, but neither had enough military power to overwhelm the
other, so they were permanently occupied what amounted to a long, drawn-out
internecine conflict.

"Where are our troops?"
I asked. Clarence explained that without the environmentalist movement,
the United States had engaged in responsibly exploiting the oil reserves
in Anwar and the Bakken Field in North Dakota and Montana, as well as
tapping oil fields off of the Florida coast. Since the United States had
developed the cleanest, least environmentally damaging drilling technologies
in the world, we'd avoided the terrible environmental destruction that
would have occurred had Russia and Venezuela done extensive exploitation
of their oil fields, since both of those countries were irresponsible
at best and criminally negligent at worst in their drilling practices.

Clarence added that six new nuclear
power plants had come online in the past decade in the United States,
and the technology they used was so advanced and so safe that we were
gradually able to retire outdated power plants and yet still increase
our electricity production capacity. Not having the environmentalists
around to hold up important drilling and nuclear energy projects had made
us virtually energy independent, and so our troops were deployed strategically
to make sure that local conflicts between Muslim countries, which were
the only remaining warlike societies on the planet, were contained and
didn't spill over to neighboring countries.

His conclusion: Not having the environmentalists
around to impede the responsible progress of energy resource development
had saved, by his estimate, more than 250,000 lives over the past decade,
much of it because we were no longer dependent on Middle Eastern Oil.
And with oil at $50.00 a barrel and gasoline at $1.79 a gallon, we were
certainly saving our citizens money.
"That's amazing," I said. "What else has happened as a
result of environmentalists not being around?"

"Well," he went on, "130,000
people in the northwest United States who work in the logging industry
and who would have lost their jobs due to the Spotted Owl legislation
still have those jobs."

"But what about the Spotted
Owl?" I asked, fearing the worst.

Clarence explained that it was never
the logging industry that threatened the Spotted Owl in the first place;
it was another more aggressive species of owl, the Barred Owl, that was
causing the demise of the Spotted Owl. The Spotted Owl has continued to
lose population, but that would have happened anyway, as we found out
in the ten years following passage of the original legislation. It was
well-known among responsible scientists that logging was not the real
reason the Spotted Owl population was declining, but New York Senator
Chuck Schumer had bowed to pressure from the environmentalists and squelched
the research that would have saved those 130,000 jobs and which would
have found other ways to try to preserve the Spotted Owl that would not
have caused such hardship to so many American citizens.

"OK," I said, determined
to seek vindication, "let's get to the big one: Global Warming."

"Global warming?" he asked,
clearly not understanding my reference.

"Yes, global warming. You know,
Al Gore's pet project, the one he won the Nobel Prize for?"

"Al Gore? Nobel Prize? Not sure
I understand."

"Do you mean to tell me that
without the environmentalists Al Gore didn't mount his global warming
initiative to stop carbon emissions that are causing our planet to heat
up uncontrollably?" I asked, by now somewhat frustrated.

"Oh, you mean the guy that lost
the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush," he said, finally
getting it. He went on to explain that, without the environmentalists
pushing their global warming agenda, responsible climate scientists had
come together to examine the verifiable data about climate fluctuations
and had determined that the primary driver of climate variation was change
in sunspot activity. They tracked the evidence of climate change for the
past century and determined that it correlated almost exactly with changes
in sunspot activity and not to increases in carbon dioxide emissions.
They're currently noting that the global temperature hasn't risen noticeably
in the past decade, but that it's actually gone down .7 degrees in just
the last year, due to the fact that sunspot activity is at a cyclical
11-year low.

Clarence went on to note that the
incidence of forest fires had dropped 70 percent over the past several
decades after President Reagan instituted responsible forest management
practices modeled after those native Americans had practiced for centuries
before we came to this country. That saved our country hundreds of billions
of dollars in property damage, not to mention the loss of human and animal
life, the damage to human health, and the loss of productivity that the
toxins and particulate matter spewed into the atmosphere by forest fires
cause.
"That would have been impossible with the environmentalists still
in the picture," he said. "For some reason they got the silly
and often disastrous notion that thinning underbrush and dead wood was
detrimental to forests and that we should let forest fires take their
course. Totally unenlightened, of course, but fortunately that's been
avoided, thanks to Reagan's sound forest management policy." And
just for good measure he added that since we've re-introduced DDT into
Africa - another thing that environmentalists had been trying to prevent
- malaria has been virtually wiped out on that continent.

"But how is this supposed to
make me feel better?" I asked. "In 'It's a Wonderful Life,'
the world was much better because of George Bailey's being there. You're
telling me the world is much worse now than it would have been without
the environmental movement."

"Well, at least you've identified
the enemy," he said, trying to lift my spirits. "You can't jump
off this bridge because there's still an important battle to be fought.
We've got to bring sanity and reason and science back into the debate,
despite the fact that that's the last thing Al Gore and the environmentalists
want. Introducing science into the climate change discussion is to the
environmentalists like holding up the Christian cross is to a vampire.
Environmentalists shrink from the truth; they don't have any answers when
the facts are brought out into the open. So you've got to keep fighting
to make sure ignorance doesn't continue to be the guiding principle in
our global climate and environmental policy . . . oh, and to prevent several
hundred thousand more deaths due to environmental irresponsibility."